Olive: A Digital Archive for Executable Content

ncreasingly, executable content pervades research and industry. Traditionally, libraries have been responsible for the preservation of historical content in its original forms, and recently in born-digital forms as well. This practice has enabled the accumulation of knowledge while reducing reinvention. Libraries have failed, however, to meet their preservation obligations in the area of executable content. Using virtual machines for curation, Olive, an Internet-based infrastructure for archiving and preserving deprecated hardware, will enable libraries to fulfill their responsibility to those segments of the community that produce dynamic, interactive, and executable content. Including this content among the responsibilities of the academic library will foster progress for engineers, scientists, historians, sociologists, and others. Use cases to be explored preferentially will include educational software, games, and scholarly articles that include executables.